Free A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen

indecipherable mass of variables, constants, and integrals that covered the better half of a page—is as meaningless to me now as it was at the time. I see no hint of silver in those symbols, no relation to the sound of a coin as it spins, then slows, then collapses on the Formica with its metallic cicada chatter.
    Although by that time I was for the most part inured to the abstract nature of much of what I was being taught, this time something snapped. Maybe the sun was shining that weekend, andI watched it too much from the table where I worked, or I losttoo much sleep over the assignment. Perhaps the hours I spenton this problem contrasted too sharply with the burgeoning awareness of my own mortality, and the knowledge that, whatever I may do with the rest of my life, the sun would never slan t exactly this same way through these same trees, never again would precisely this air course through my twenty-one-year-oldlungs. If I had possessed then the confidence and knowledge I have now—confidence in the validity of my own experience—I would have strode into class on Monday, pulled a coin out of my pocket, spun it on the teacher's desk, and said, "There's your answer."
    Of course, if I then possessed the confidence and knowledge I have now, I probably would have flunked the class.
    Most everyone I knew hated being at the Colorado School of Mines. Nearly all of us viewed it as a four- or five-year ordeal, something to be endured, like a mule endures the whip. A friend was fond of recalling that he first heard AC/DC's Highway to Hell while driving to register for classes. I'm certain the thought that college could be an enjoyable learning process never occurred to most of my peers: we merely wanted to survive it. This attitude was actively encouraged by many of the professors. I remember one class, a required part of everyone's sophomore core, that fully two-thirds of the 300 or so students each semester flunked or dropped. There was another class—quantum mechanics, an advanced physics elective no one in his (the student body was overwhelmingly male) right mind ever took—in which five of six students failed and the other received a "D."
    There is only one reward that would cause so many people to endure such an unpleasant and extended trial: money—or rather the promise of money. Students and faculty alike were explicit about this. At the time, graduates from the Colorado School of Mines were virtually guaranteed high-paying jobs with major petroleum or mining transnationals. Headhunters for these corporations knew that Mines’' students, having survived these four (or more likely five) years, would have what it takes to thrive in the corporate world.
     
    I differed from many of the students in two significant ways. The first is that until my parents divorced, my family had been wealthy, so I already had an intimate knowledge of the truism that money does not equal happiness: thus I did not have the same burning drive—"When I get out of here, the first thing I'm gonna do is get a red Porsche. And then a black Mustang"—as many of my fellow students.
    The other difference, an advantage that in many ways counterbalanced the disadvantage of my dimmed enthusiasm for money, was the long, intimate practice of denying my feelings. If there was one thing I could do well—one area in which my confidence soared—it was in the ability to endure. I was at the time proud of, though also troubled by, my capacity to not show emotion.
    I can remember a day in fifth grade, a bright blue January day in Montana, the sun so piercing you had to squint even to look at its reflection in the dulled metal of the monkey bars. Sitting here in front of this computer, twenty-six years and one month later, I can see the short grass of the football field bend in waves before the cold wind, and still feel that wind on my neck. I was standing alone that particular day, that particular recess, and I was crying—something I rarely did. It was